The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness by Eric Lomax Read Free Book Online Page A

survive not only in the face of the enemy, but also within your own army.
    With this in mind I applied for a commission, and appeared before an interview board in the building owned by the Scotsman newspaper on the North Bridge. Washed and polished and eager to please, I was told by the major who interviewed me that the average expectation of life of a second-lieutenant on active service in the Great War had been two weeks. I said I wished to persist.
     
    While I was waiting for my application to be processed, I volunteered to go to the Orkney Islands, where the battleship Royal Oak had just been sunk, in its base at Scapa Flow, with almost a thousand casualties. This was the first real shock of the war, and might have taught us more about the vulnerability of gigantic gun-platforms. People could hardly accept that it was enemy action that had sunk such a dreadnought; it must be sabotage, or some fault of our own. But of course it was a German submarine. In any case, our signals work clearly needed improvement.
    We sailed from Scrabster Harbour, near Thurso on the north coast of Scotland. After the worst sea journey I could remember, a day of icy wind and pitching seas on a fifty-year-old steamer that lacked any suitable covering for the North Sea in late autumn, we arrived - Sergeant Ferguson and his squad of twenty, including me - in Stromness. We settled in and helped to control the local signals traffic, by radio, telephone and telegraph. We were part of the North Signal Section, one of His Majesty's more remote garrisons.
    I liked it on the cold, bleak island, working methodically every day in a requisitioned hotel. What I thought of as my developing gift for survival and adroit moves in large organizations made me the entrepreneur of the group. I did a deal with one of the cooks in the hotel by which she provided fined egg rolls and tea and I sold them to the men in the middle of the morning. I was much in demand.
    On an island, you noticed people's isolation more. When I distributed the mail for our little squad, I saw that some of the men could never conceal their distress when letters failed to arrive. And a couple of them looked almost terrified if mail did come for them.
     
    I had considered volunteering for Shetland, but the thought of a 115-mile trip still further north by trawler in mid-winter through one of the worst stretches of sea in the world was too much even for me. The attraction of that Viking outpost was strong; my mother's voice spoke whenever I remembered its harsh moorland and its ocean light. But the other voices were insistent, and I missed the chance that might have kept me marooned and safe on a little archipelago while the deluge lasted.
    Orders arrived, in March 1940, instructing me to report for preliminary training before I could go to a Royal Signals training unit for officer cadets.
    Sergeant Ferguson and I left Stromness on a fine March morning, and the St Ola, the same awful steamer that had brought us to Orkney, chugged out of the harbour into Hoy Sound where the wind, rain and sea ripped into us. In the huge sheltered bowl of Scapa Flow, with huddled islands all around the horizon, the weather was bearable, but once out of its shelter and into the Pentland Firth, the gale threw the steamer around like a toy. Ferguson and I settled down in the lee of the funnel, where there was a memory of warmth and shelter, and before long we were soaked through, frozen stiff and nauseated. I was violently sick over my sergeant's greatcoat, but he didn't seem to mind; he was in another world.
    I had made my choice; I was to be an officer.
    For two months I sat with a fellow NCO in an upstairs room in a drill hall in Edinburgh being given intensive personal tuition in radio work by a lieutenant in the Royal Signals. Our text was TTie

    Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy, a theoretical tome in two volumes. Each radio set also had its own manual, and we worked hard, hard enough to satisfy our